the legacy of the parliament of paris a so-called “royal sitting” because of the decorated bed (with cushions and a ceiling), that was not devoted (as in the past) to a judiciary session under the presidency of the king but a meeting for imposing the royal will in legislative matters. The “lit de justice” became thus the expression of the development of the royal legislation (associated with the obligation for all judges to respect the royal ordinances and with the idea that judgments decided against these ordinances were void) and a means to resolve, in favour of the king, the conflicts with theParlement. It was used again in 1537, in 1563 before the Parlement of Rouen, in 1573 and in 1597. During the Religious Wars, the Parlement supported the repression against the Reform: the Calvinist counsellor Anne du Bourg was condemned to death and burnt in 1559. During the appeasement policy, the Parlement had to accept the return of protestant judges, but it supported the 1572 massacre of the Saint-Barthélémy. If the more engaged supporters of the royal power and of Henri IV– the “royal party” – were jurists outside the Parlement, like Jean Bodin (who subjected the Parlement to the king in his works) or Etienne Pasquier (general advocate at theChambre des comptes), the 1593 ruling calledarrêt Lemaistre (from the name of the provisory President of Parlement endowed to present this decision to the general lieutenant of the kingdom) reaffirmed the fundamental laws of the kingdom that prohibited the transfer of the crown to a “foreign” or non-Catholic prince, a ruling that was finally in favour of Henri IV(converted from Protestantism to Catholicism one month after this ruling). About the evolutions during the sixteenth century, it can be said that the developments of the royal legislation – with many ordinances of “reformation of justice” containing a great number of articles and likely to be approved by the assembly of the General Estates – have weakened the importance of the Parlement in framing the legal order of the kingdom. In many matters, concerning what we call today “public law”, the main source of lawwas now the royal legislation and, despite its powers linked to the registration of ordinances, the Parlement could not block these royal wills. In August 1572, theParlement is constrained to accept (in the presence of the King’s brother) an edict imposing a tax on judicial offices, these offices that became likely to be sold and inherited for the great ad124
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